Recycled Knowledge

2016-10-07

I am now twittering under the name, not of Sanders, but of @Woldemar_Avalon, because I am John Woldemar Cowan and my home city is New Avalon, or in English, the Big Apple. So far I am mostly using it as a publicly readable commonplace book: somewhere to write down the quotations that decorate my mental structure. Follow and enjoy.

2015-11-30

Or as Bilbo put it, escaping goblins to be caught by wolves. After pretty much recovering from the meningitis and its psychological sequels, I stepped on a minute piece of glass in my kitchen. Although I had bled a bit, my wife Gale got the glass out, and I went to the podiatrist to be fixed up. The lesion was only 5 mm x 5 mm and 1 mm deep and looked fairly trivial. But within three days, I had massive cellulitis (bacterial infection of the skin) in the foot and lower leg. Foot trouble for diabetics is far worse than foot trouble for anyone else, and hey presto, I was back in the hospital being looked after by three separate teams of doctors: podiatry, infectious diseases, and family medicine (one of the analogues of general practice in the U.S.)

Heavy-duty antibiotics relieved the pain in the leg (I feel no pain, touch, or temperature sensations in my feet, though I do feel pressure) within a few days, but the external signs were still very ugly. So my podiatrist decided to cut me open at the worst-looking spot, basically chopping from the top of my foot down almost to the sole. Fortunately, I've had no pain from this. More antibiotics and having my foot squeezed to get the pus out was pretty successful, and I was sent home after two weeks: a very different story from two days, but at least my mind wasn't affected this time. Of course, I'd gone from an infected foot to a wounded one (the trivial cut on my sole had healed already), though at least the wound was clean and straight.

So I've been back at home for the last two weeks with a permanent IV line installed and a less comprehensive antibiotic, after I was found to have non-MRSA staph. The surgical wound is healing better than expected: fortunately, my gross circulation is fairly unimpaired (you can feel strong pulses in my feet), so it's quite likely that I'll come out the other side essentially as well off as before. (I have two permanently broken toes on that foot, but the don't impair my walking.) Meanwhile, I'm working from home and attending meetings by Skype, but only at 85% of full time thanks to all the doctors I have to visit repeatedly. I'm walking on the heel of the bad foot using a surgical shoe (a sort of sandal with a very stiff sole) plus a crutch on the good side, and hopefully will be upgraded to something less restrictive after tomorrow. Again hopefully, the IV will be terminated after Wednesday.

Oddly, no connection was ever found between the glass cut on my sole and all the pus in my foot, so just how the staph got into my foot remains completely unexplained. Gale, who is not diabetic, had had cellulitis a month before, but she had a visible scratch on her leg, and two days in the hospital on IV fixed her right up. Also, the cold I mentioned turned out to be an allergy, which nose drops are slowly clearing. Nothing has been done about the low hemoglobin yet, and I also will have to see a vascular surgeon when I can walk again.

2015-10-17

This post is mostly meant to account for what has happened to me since August 23, with some explanation of the things I have posted on the Internet lately. It will be of interest, if at all, to (a) people interested in me and my physical, mental, and emotional state; (b) people interested in certain medical matters which I exemplify; (c) people who are puzzled by my recent lack of postings followed by rather oddball postings and private emails (or remarks, if you know me in person).

I will mostly state what happened to me in the order it happened.

On August 23, I left work very ill, and arrived home shortly thereafter, where I was found to have a fever. I took acetaminophen to try to reduce the fever, and rested. On August 25, I went to an internist and received a diagnosis of strep throat (although my throat did not hurt) based on a quick strep test. I was then given a large penicillin injection to kill the strep organism, though I was told it would not much shorten the course of my disease. I was advised to rest and drink fluids so
that I would not become dehydrated from the fever.

Unfortunately, there were two mistakes here. One was that the positive result on the test was false, and therefore the penicillin was useless though harmless. The other was that because I had undergone roux-en-Y surgery in December 2012, it was impossible for me to drink sufficient fluids sufficiently quickly to avoid dehydration. Over the period from at least August 23 on, therefore, I was suffering from an unknown illness, which turned out to be two illnesses: viral meningitis, and an upper-respiratory viral infection in the nature of a cold. I was also, as a result of the fever, suffering from progressive but unsuspected dehydration.

On October 1, I went to another internist; due to a change in my insurance between August 25 and October 1, my first internist could not see me unless I paid him cash in full on the spot. This second internist ran further tests establishing that I did not have the flu, or pneumonia, or any of a variety of other diseases, but could find no specific disease. I was again sent home and told to rest (which I did) and drink additional fluids (which I did not and could not). The cold was evident at this point, but did not account for the fever; the meningitis was as yet unsuspected.

Unfortunately, of the two fever-reducing drugs I was told to take, one (acetaminophen) was effective but easy to overdose on, so I could only take it in limited amounts. Either for that reason, or because of the natural course of the meningitis, I was feverish on some days but not other days. The other drug (ibuprofen) was also effective, but had the bad side effect of causing me to shiver. In order to stop shivering, I had to add outside warmth (a blanket was insufficient), which would revive the fever. When I finally noticed this pattern, I stopped taking ibuprofen, but continued to take acetaminophen.

The ongoing and untreated dehydration had several side effects. For one thing, my blood sugar (I am a diabetic) went some 200 points above my previous worst-case reading, which was itself some 200 points above non-diabetic normal. Another was that I urinated less than usual, and with darker urine. Yet another was that I found it hard to draw blood for blood-sugar tests. My thinking function became disordered, not only when I was feverish (a familiar phenomenon enough) but also when I was not feverish. As a result I began to fear that even if I recovered from whatever I had (besides the cold), my thinking would remain disordered, and I would be unable to work thereafter. (I did not fear absolute starvation for myself and my family, but I know too well how difficult the life of a partly mentally disabled person in the United States is.) Lastly, I began to stop producing normal tears, so that my eyes partly dried out.

Due to the dry eyes and the high blood sugar, I decided to go to the emergency room on October 5th. I was admitted to the hospital (something I do not remember) and was put on IV fluids and a Foley catheter (a device which causes urine to flow out of my bladder through my urethra into a bag without volition on my part). I was also found to have a bacterial infection in my blood and my kidneys, for which I was put on antibiotics.

Investigation of the blood work done on the 25th but never yet looked at revealed that I had never had strep throat. I was given a lumbar puncture in the hospital, which finally diagnosed the viral meningitis that I had had since the 23rd. This was now passing off, as the virus was no longer active (nor would there have been any treatment other than supportive treatment if it had been).

On October 7th, the hospital concluded that I no longer needed fluids and removed the fluid bags from my arms. On the same day, I demanded that the hospital remove the IV taps (under the specious claim that they hurt me), and later that day signed myself out of the hospital against medical advice, as I could see that the hospital had nothing to offer me medically, and was only trying to keep me in a bed out of an abundance of caution.

I wanted to leave because, as is often the case in hospitals, I had had very bad nights there, being unable to sleep well. Furthermore, I had a roommate who was dying of terminal cancer and kept insisting that the hospital release him; sometimes he lost his grip and believed instead that he was no longer in the hospital but in a police precinct, a Chinese restaurant, or some other presumably non-existent location. The fact that during one period there were in fact police in his room, apparently to protect the hospital staff from his aggressiveness, no doubt tended to confirm this particular delusion. Although I was recovering from the meningitis and dehydration that had disordered my thinking, being exposed to all this nonsense was also disordering it, leading me to conclude that it was outright mentally harmful (and not physically beneficial) for me to be in the hospital.

Indeed, I had come to believe that if I died in the hospital (as seemed likely in my disordered state of thinking, though objectively it was not) that I would be dying in Hell, something I desperately wanted to avoid. The impersonal treatment I received seemed to underscore this. So I came home, still suffering from the same cold, but free of meningitis and fever, and cured of my blood and kidney infections as well as my dehydration. Once I had a good night's sleep at home, many of my mental issues were relieved.

I went to a third internist on October 9th, who had access to my hospital records and in fact had been the one who had admitted me to the hospital: he told me several more diseases I did not have (though two remained, and as far as I know still remain, possible; though they had not grown out on a bacterial culture, they might still do so). By his advice, I spent the next few days recovering from both my sickness and my bad hospital experiences, began to work (without going to the office) on October 12, and went to the office for the first time October 13 and for the second time on October 14. I had gone to the office, unwisely, on another day (I forget which one) sometime early in October, but got little done that day. On October 19 I will be seeing yet a fourth doctor, an infectious-disease specialist who saw me briefly in the hospital.

The upshot is that while my thinking is no longer (I believe) disordered in general, I still suffer from the fear that it may be disordered in particular instances. Therefore I have been asking questions whose answers may seem obvious, and making remarks whose truth surely is obvious, to outside observers. I am doing this not to be funny, nor to be ironic (to pretend to know less than I know) but to reassure myself that I am in fact understanding correctly and reasoning correctly. Since my confidence in my thinking (as opposed to my thinking itself) may take some time to restore, this may continue for some time.

I hope I have been sufficiently clear in writing this. I am entirely open to answering any questions, in the comments or privately, about any part of my experiences.

Update: It turns out the blood poisoning and kidney infection were not confirmed by the lab test, so things weren't quite as bad as they were thought to be. My mind continues to clear. However, my hemoglobin is only about 60% of what it should be (probably accounting for my continuing fatigue), so here beginneth a new round of doctor visits and lab tests.

2014-02-01

... so I'm looking for work. Though I've been a programmer most of my professional life, I've spent the last four years doing document schema design and ontology. I have survived quite a lot of generations of programming technologies, so I am nothing if not adaptable. For any given tech-of-the-moment, my answer is "I may not know it yet, but I will know it very quickly."

If you, my readers, know of anything either in New York City or its environs, or in telecommuting land (I've been working mostly-at-home for the last four years, and especially in the past year), I would certainly like to hear about it. Here's my resume in Word and PDF formats, and you can contact me at cowan@ccil.org.

Update: After working a bunch of short-term consulting jobs, I am now employed full-time as a back-end programmer and team lead at Tablet Hotels, an online travel agent specializing in boutique and specialized hotels, which we check out individually.

2014-01-07

I'm announcing my UK Whacking Latin family of keyboard drivers for Windows. They allow you to type more than 900 different Unicode characters, without interfering substantially with the regular use of a UK keyboard. The way in which the additional non-ASCII characters are reached is by using the AltGr key.

The keyboards are designed for people who use the regular or extended UK keyboard heavily, but occasionally need to type other Latin letters (especially accented ones), symbols, and punctuation. In particular, the keyboard supports the Windows-1252 (U.S. and Western Europe) repertoire, as well as almost every Latin letter in Unicode.

There are two basic ways to type characters other than the regular ASCII set. A few characters are directly typed by holding down AltGr and pressing another key. For example, to type the character æ, simply type AltGr+a. As you might expect, the capital version Æ is typed as AltGr+Shift+a. However, the great majority of characters are typed using AltGr plus some key, followed by another key that doesn't use AltGr. For example, the letter a with diaeresis (ä) is typed with AltGr+; (that is, AltGr plus semicolon) followed by a, or by A if you want the capital a with diaeresis (Ä).

Combinations like AltGr+; are known as "dead keys", because they appear to be dead when you type them; you need to press a following key to actually input a character. The current version, F, of the Whacking Latin keyboard has a total of 33 dead keys. 23 specific accent marks and modifying strokes are provided, as well as curly quotation marks and other punctuation, math symbols, Roman numerals, fractions, arrows, pointing hands, math Greek letters and symbols (no accents), obscure Latin letters, and a subset of IPA letters needed for English. (Some math symbols were taken from the space cadet keyboard.) Some of these dead keys are typed using AltGr+Shift, which makes them a little awkward to type, but they are intended to be as easy to remember as possible.

Update: There are four variants in the Whacking Latin family: Whacking John, which is meant for English only; Whacking Sandy, which is meant for English and Scottish Gaelic; Whacking Mick, which is meant for English and Irish; and Whacking Taffy, which is meant for English and Welsh. They all have the same repertoire of characters, but the last three variants make it easier to type texts in those specific languages. Whacking John is upward compatible with Microsoft's UK keyboard, and Whacking Sandy with Microsoft's UK Extended keyboard, except for the AltGr combinations on those keyboards.

These keyboards and the associated documentation are Open Source, and may be freely copied and modified. The license terms for all is the MIT License. Use, share, and enjoy!

2013-11-16

Serbo-Croat? Serbian? Croatian? Bosnian? Montenegrin? How many languages is that? Saying that there are four languages, or that there is one, are both oversimplifications. Here's an approximation of the whole truth:

In the linguist's sense, there is just a single language, a South Slavic dialect continuum with a dozen or more dialects and four standardized forms. However, Standard Serbo-Croat, which prevailed until 1989, was never a single standard. Rather, it was a fusion of two existing standards, an agreement that Standard Croatian and Standard Serbian (both of which already existed) would be treated as equally acceptable for all purposes. In this way it is like the position of Standard Bokmål and Standard Nynorsk in Norway, and like what would be the case if British society decided to accept Standard American English as a written standard with a status equal to Standard British English, or vice versa. It is that agreement which came apart when Yugoslavia did, and it has been followed by the creation of a third standard for Bosnian and a fourth one for Montenegrin.

All four standard languages are founded on the historic dialect of Eastern Hercegovina, an instance of the neo-Štokavian macro-dialect which is now the most widely spoken variety of naš jezik 'our language', as it is politely called, in the whole of the former Yugoslavia. (Macro-dialects are conventionally labeled by the word they use for 'what?' — in this case, što.) They differ roughly as follows:

Standard Croatian employs exclusively Ijekavian forms (that is, the descendant of historic jat vowels is ije), admits influences from the Chakavian and Kajkavian macro-dialects, is relatively hostile to Western loanwords and does not normally respell the ones it accepts, and is written exclusively in the Latin script.

Standard Serbian allows either Ijekavian or Ekavian forms, has no such influences from the other macro-dialects, is relatively friendly to Western loanwords and respells the ones it accepts to match Serbian pronunciation conventions, and is written with equal acceptability in the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.

Standard Bosnian is close to Standard Serbian, has some influences from the palaeo-Shtokavian macro-dialect, is exclusively Ijekavian, and uses the Latin script only.

Standard Montenegrin is even closer to Standard Serbian, but it uses the Latin script only and is exclusively Ijekavian.

There are also many differences in vocabulary, on about the same scale as the differences between British and American English.

My understanding is essentially dependent on the work of Miro Kačić, the Croatian linguist (in both senses of that term). While highly respected, Kačić's work is of course controversial, like everything else about the language he worked on.

2013-09-07

I'm announcing my U.S. Moby Latin keyboard driver for Windows. It allows you to type more than 900 different Unicode characters, without interfering substantially with the regular use of a U.S. keyboard. The way in which the additional non-ASCII characters are reached is by using the AltGr key. (Not too many keyboards actually have this key, but its equivalent is the right-hand Alt key, or on keyboards without a right-hand Alt key, using the Ctrl and Alt keys at the same time.)

The keyboard is designed for people who use the regular U.S. keyboard heavily, but occasionally need to type other Latin letters (especially accented ones), symbols, and punctuation. In particular, the keyboard supports the Windows-1252 (U.S. and Western Europe) repertoire, as well as almost every Latin letter in Unicode.

There are two basic ways to type characters other than the regular ASCII set. A few characters are directly typed by holding down AltGr and pressing another key. For example, to type the character æ, simply type AltGr+a. As you might expect, the capital version Æ is typed as AltGr+Shift+a. However, the great majority of characters are typed using AltGr plus some key, followed by another key that doesn't use AltGr. For example, the letter a with diaeresis (ä) is typed with AltGr+; (that is, AltGr plus semicolon) followed by a, or by A if you want the capital a with diaeresis (Ä).

Combinations like AltGr+; are known as "dead keys", because they appear to be dead when you type them; you need to press a following key to actually input a character. The current version, C, of the Moby Latin keyboard has a total of 33 dead keys. 23 specific accent marks and modifying strokes are provided, as well as curly quotation marks and other punctuation, math symbols, Roman numerals, fractions, arrows, pointing hands, math Greek letters and symbols (no accents), obscure Latin letters, and a subset of IPA letters needed for English. (Some math symbols were taken from the space cadet keyboard.) Some of these dead keys are typed using AltGr+Shift, which makes them a little awkward to type, but they are intended to be as easy to remember as possible.

This keyboard and the associated documentation are Open Source, and may be freely copied and modified. The license terms for both is the MIT License. Use, share, and enjoy!

2013-01-02

Back in 1999-2002, starting before the Peter Jackson films had appeared, a blogger named Mark-Edmond Howell undertook to read the whole of The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings in that order and to write chapter-by-chapter commentary in Tolkien Online as he went. As he himself says, he had started The Hobbit some years before but not gotten very far into it, and was vaguely aware of some of the pre-Jackson films. While theonering.net has undertaken to lovingly preserve A Tolkien Virgin, their index is in reverse order of posting (which sometimes differs slightly from book order), and is chopped up arbitrarily, making it hard to navigate. As a public service, therefore, I am providing this organized and properly ordered table of contents to A Tolkien Virgin, using chapter titles rather than numbers in all cases (Book IV, Chapter 4, what's that? "Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit", ahhhh!) Share and enjoy. And as Mark-Edmond says, keep thinking!Introductory

2012-11-25

Here is Christian Morgenstern's lovely poem "Das Nasobēm", which was written around 1895 and is usually called a nonsense poem, though not in the sense of "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves ..." Indeed, all the words in it make plain sense except one; the nonsense comes in from the fact that once you have read the poem, you still know nothing about the animal.

B) A single dominant implementation which comes with a fairly large library which everybody uses; typically there is no formal standardization. Substantial third-party libraries may or may not be available. Second-source implementations are continually playing catch-up with the dominant version. Ada, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby use strategy B. So do most DSLs, research languages, and personal toys. Haskell used to be strategy C but is now B due to the increasing dominance of GHC.

C) Multiple implementations, relatively small standard libraries, each implementation comes with lots of libraries. Substantial third-party librarys may or may not be available. The Lisp languages use strategy C; so do Forth, ML, and the Posix shell.

Common Lisp and the shell have fairly large standard libraries (for the shell, it's the Posix utilities that constitute the library); R5RS Scheme and even R6RS Scheme have fairly small ones. When the R7RS Scheme process is complete, the relative sizes in the Lisp world will be R5RS < R7RS-small < R6RS < Common Lisp < R7RS-large, but the standard libraries of R7RS-large will be optional for conformance rather than mandatory, so Common Lisp may still be larger in practice.

In a strategy C language, an implementation is more than just an implementation; it's a community, or even a movement. Strategy A languages don't draw this sort of loyalty for the most part; decisions between implementations are based only on cost, or else technical criteria such as speed, space, compilation speed, or availability in a particular environment. Strategy B languages have only one community per language, with a few splinter groups; that's what makes them such juggernauts today.

But to write your code for Chicken or Racket or Chibi Scheme involves more than a cold-blooded decision about the advantages of these particular environments. Technical factors may control the choice in some circumstances. But where they don't, people end up deciding based on essentially tribal factors, the same that make people fanatically loyal to vi or Emacs (or, in my case, "ex").

That's not necessarily a bad thing. But it would be a good thing, unqualified, if some of the library code available to Chicken programmers was also directly available, without fuss, to Racket or even Chibi Scheme programmers. Essentially everything new in R7RS-small is in pursuit of that goal one way or another. Likewise, the packages in R7RS-large (which is not yet fully specified) are meant to help at a higher level with that interoperability goal.

2012-04-05

Parallelism refers to physically simultaneous execution. When you raise both arms above your head, you do so in parallel. Nothing can be more parallel than the number of execution agents simultaneously available: on an 8-core system, you can add up 8 rows of a matrix in parallel, but not 16 rows. Furthermore, some problems cannot be parallelized, whereas others can be executed entirely in parallel, and there are many cases in between.

Concurrency refers to conceptually simultaneous execution. When you juggle balls, you are executing a concurrent program: despite appearances,jugglers only throw or catch one ball at a time. A concurrent program can execute on a single execution agent, on as many agents as it has concurrent components, or anything in between, so concurrency does not depend on parallelism. We usually speak of concurrency when there is interaction between the concurrent components.

Flow-based programming, of which a shell pipeline is the most familiar example, is based on the concurrent execution of mostly isolated processes that communicate via flows. Because the individual components are isolated, they may be executed in parallel or not. Because there are no constraints on what components may do with their inputs, parallel execution may or may not actually speed up the computation.

2011-11-29

John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp, died last month. The new R7RS Scheme standard will be dedicated to his memory. As another dedication, I thought I'd resurrect his theorem prover, which was published in the Lisp 1.5 manual, and translate it into Scheme. Comments in square brackets are mine; everything else is McCarthy's.

When this code was written, I was still in diapers and a lot of you probably didn't even exist — and yet it only needed indentation, a few changes from cond to if (which helped with the indentation), and a sprinkling of question marks. It's interesting that this Lisp is so old that () is not identical to #f. The procedure names suck and should be replaced with better names (ending in question marks).

2011-09-30

From Beckett's early novel Molloy, later reprinted separately under the title of "Sucking-Stones". I have introduced paragraphing for readability, though in Beckett's text this is just part of a huge 80-page paragraph, one of only two in Molloy's monologue. Reprinted without permission.

I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat.

Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on.

But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four. In which case, far from sucking the sixteen stones turn and turn about, I was really only sucking four, always the same, turn and turn about. But I shuffled them well in my pockets, before I began to suck, and again, while I sucked, before transferring them, in the hope of obtaining a more general circulation of the stones from pocket to pocket. But this was only a makeshift that could not long content a man like me. So I began to look for something else.

And the first thing I hit upon was that I might do better to transfer the stones four by four, instead of one by one, that is to say, during the sucking, to take the three stones remaining in the right pocket of my greatcoat and replace them by the four in the right pocket of my trousers , and these by the four in the left pocket of my trousers, and these by the four in the left pocket of my greatcoat, and finally these by the three from the right pocket of my greatcoat, plus the one, as soon as I had finished sucking it, which was in my mouth. Yes, it seemed to me at first that by so doing I would arrive at a better result.

But on further reflection I had to change my mind and confess that the circulation of the stones four by four came to exactly the same thing as their circulation one by one. For if I was certain of finding each time, in the right pocket of my greatcoat, four stones totally different from their immediate predecessors, the possibility nevertheless remained of my always chancing on the same stone, within each group of four, and consequently of my sucking, not the sixteen turn and turn about as I wished, but in fact four only, always the same, turn and turn about. So I had to seek elswhere than in the mode of circulation. For no matter how I caused the stones to circulate, I always ran the same risk.

It was obvious that by increasing the number of my pockets I was bound to increase my chances of enjoying my stones in the way I planned, that is to say one after the other until their number was exhausted. Had I had eight pockets, for example, instead of the four I did have, then even the most diabolical hazard could not have prevented me from sucking at least eight of my sixteen stones, turn and turn about. The truth is I should have needed sixteen pockets in order to be quite easy in my mind. And for a long time I could see no other conclusion than this, that short of having sixteen pockets, each with its stone, I could never reach the goal I had set myself, short of an extraordinary hazard. And if at a pinch I could double the number of my pockets, were it only by dividing each pocket in two, with the help of a few safety-pins let us say, to quadruple them seemed to be more than I could manage. And I did not feel inclined to take all that trouble for a half-measure.

For I was beginning to lose all sense of measure, after all this wrestling and wrangling, and to say, All or nothing. And if I was tempted for an instant to establish a more equitable proportion between my stones and my pockets , by reducing the former to the number of the latter, it was only for an instant. For it would have been an admission of defeat. And sitting on the shore, before the sea, the sixteen stones spread out before my eyes, I gazed at them in anger and perplexity. For just as I had difficulty in sitting in a chair, or in an arm-chair, because of my stiff leg, you understand, so I had none in sitting on the ground, because of my stiff leg and my stiffening leg, for it was about this time that my good leg, good in the sense that it was not stiff, began to stiffen. I needed a prop under the ham you understand, and even under the whole length of the leg, the prop of the earth. And while I gazed thus at my stones, revolving interminable martingales all equally defective, and crushing handfuls of sand, so that the sand ran through my fingers and fell back on the strand, yes, while thus I lulled my mind and part of my body, one day suddenly it dawned on me, dimly, that I might perhaps achieve my purpose without increasing the number of my pockets, or reducing the number of my stones, but simply by sacrificing the principle of trim.

The meaning of this illumination, which suddenly began to sing within me, like a verse of Isaiah, or of Jeremiah, I did not penetrate at once, and notably the word trim, which I had never met with, in this sense, long remained obscure. Finally I seemed to grasp that this word trim could not here mean anything else, anything better, than the distribution of the sixteen stones in four groups of four, one group in each pocket, and that it was my refusal to consider any distribution other than this that had vitiated my calculations until then and rendered the problem literally insoluble. And it was on the basis of this interpretation, whether right or wrong, that I finally reached a solution, inelegant assuredly, but sound, sound.

Now I am willing to believe, indeed I firmly believe, that other solutions to this problem might have been found and indeed may still be found, no less sound, but much more elegant than the one I shall now describe, if I can. And I believe too that had I been a little more insistent, a little more resistant, I could have found them myself. But I was tired, but I was tired, and I contented myself ingloriously with the first solution that was a solution, to this problem. But not to go over the heartbreaking stages through which I passed before I came to it here it is, in all its hideousness.

All (all!) that was necessary was to put, for example, six stones in the right pocket of my greatcoat, or supply pocket, five in the right pocket of my trousers, and five in the left pocket of my trousers, that makes the lot, twice five ten plus six sixteen, and none, for none remained, in the left pocket of my greatcoat, which for the time being remained empty, empty of stones that is, for its usual contents remained, as well as occasional objects. For where do you think I hid my vegetable knife, my silver, my horn and the other things that I have not yet named, perhaps shall never name. Good. Now I can begin to suck. Watch me closely. I take a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat , suck it, stop sucking it, put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat, the one empty (of stones). I take a second stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, suck it put it in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And so on until the right pocket of my greatcoat is empty (apart from its usual and casual contents) and the six stones I have just sucked, one after the other, are all in the left pocket of my greatcoat.

Pausing then, and concentrating, so as not to make a balls of it, I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, in which there are no stones left, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. At this stage then the left pocket of my greatcoat is again empty of stones, while the right pocket of my greatcoat is again supplied, and in the vright way, that is to say with other stones than those I have just sucked. These other stones I then begin to suck, one after the other, and to transfer as I go along to the left pocket of my greatcoat, being absolutely certain, as far as one can be in an affair of this kind, that I am not sucking the same stones as a moment before, but others.

And when the right pocket of my greatcoat is again empty (of stones), and the five I have just sucked are all without exception in the left pocket of my greatcoat, then I proceed to the same redistribution as a moment before, or a similar redistribution, that is to say I transfer to the right pocket of my greatcoat, now again available, the five stones in the right pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the six stones in the left pocket of my trousers, which I replace by the five stones in the left pocket of my greatcoat. And there I am ready to begin again. Do I have to go on? No, for it is clear that after the next series, of sucks and transfers, I shall be back where I started, that is with the first six stones back in the supply pocket, the next five in the right pocket of my stinking old trousers and finally the last five in left pocket of same, and my sixteen stones will have been sucked once at least in impeccable succession, not one sucked twice, not one left unsucked.

It is true that next time I could scarcely hope to suck my stones in the same order as the first time and that the first, seventh and twelfth for example of the first cycle might very well be the sixth, eleventh, and sixteenth respectively of the second, if the worst came to the worst. But this was a drawback I could not avoid. And if in the cycles taken together utter confusion was bound to reign, at least within each cycle taken separately I could be easy in my mind, at least as easy as one can be, in a proceeding of this kind. For in order for each cycle to be identical, as to the succession of stones in my mouth, and God knows I had set my heart on it, the only means were numbered stones or sixteen pockets. And rather than make twelve more pockets or number my stones, I preferred to make the best of the comparative peace of mind I enjoyed within each cycle taken separately.

For it was not enough to number the stones, but I would have had to remember, every time I put a stone in my mouth, the number I needed and look for it in my pocket. Which would have put me off stone for ever, in a very short time. For I would never have been sure of not making a mistake, unless of course I had kept a kind of register, in which to tick off the stones one by one, as I sucked them. And of this I believed myself incapable. No, the only perfect solution would have been the sixteen pockets, symmetrically disposed, each one with its stone. Then I would have needed neither to number nor to think, but merely, as I sucked a given stone, to move on the fifteen others, a delicate business admittedly, but within my power, and to call always on the same pocket when I felt like a suck. This would have freed me from all anxiety, not only within each cycle taken separately, but also for the sum of all cycles, though they went on forever.

But however imperfect my own solution was, I was pleased at having found it all alone, yes, quite pleased. And if it was perhaps less sound than I had thought in the first flush of discovery, its inelegance never diminished. And it was above all inelegant in this, to my mind, that the uneven distribution was painful to me, bodily. It is true that a kind of equilibrium was reached, at a given moment, in the early stages of each cycle, namely after the third suck and before the fourth, but it did not last long, and the rest of the time I felt the weight of the stones dragging me now to one side, now to the other. There was something more than a principle I abandoned, when I abandoned the equal distribution, it was a bodily need. But to suck the stones in the way I have described, not haphazard, but with method, was also I think a bodily need. Here then were two incompatible bodily needs, at loggerheads. Such things happen.

But deep down I didn't give a tinker's curse about being off my balance, dragged to the right hand and the left, backwards and forewards. And deep down it was all the same to me whether I sucked a different stone each time or always the same stone, until the end of time. For they all tasted exactly the same. And if I had collected sixteen, it was not in order to ballast myself in such and such a way, or to suck them turn about, but simply to have a little store, so as never to be without. But deep down I didn't give a fiddler's curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn't be any the worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed.

[It seems to me that Molloy underestimates the utility of numbering his stones. He could simply note the number n of the stone in his mouth when he removes it, and then search his pockets for stone n+1 (modulo 16). With four stones per pocket and no stone-shifting, he will have on average to remove two before finding it.]

2011-09-29

the original edition, published in twelve volumes from 1888 to 1928, and known retrospectively as OED1

the OED2, consisting of a supplement published in four volumes from 1972 to 1986 (there was a 1933 supplement to OED1 too, but it was superseded by the four-volume supplement so I'm ignoring it here) and merged with the text of OED1 in 1989, after which two volumes of new words and senses were published in 1993 and one more in 1997

the OED3, currently in progress and being published online only.

When you look at the online version, each page is marked OED2 or OED3, but since the supplement only included new words and meanings of words since OED1, many of the so-called OED2 pages are really unmodified OED1. What is more, the OED1 volumes were published in installments called fascicles, and very little revision was done before the fascicles were merged into volumes.

So here's a table of when the various fascicles, volumes, and editions were published, so that you can find out, at least probably if not definitively, the true age of an OED definition. Unless otherwise noted, all the entries are OED1. Note that the fascicles weren't necessarily published exactly in alphabetical order, because several editors worked on the project simultaneously.

2011-07-24

RFC 1178, a wise and funny set of rules on how to name computers (and how not to), recommends that groups of computers that have something in common be given names that have something in common. The principle isn't limited to computers, to be sure.

Here's a list of 255 groups of names ranging in size from two names on upward. I can't tell you where they come from, though I very much doubt anyone will sue you for reusing them. Feel free to figure out and post what the common factors are, the more specific the better, though I don't have any more authoritative information than you do. Obviously, answers of the form "These are the names of the xxxx's at yyyy" are not helpful.

Challenge: A few of the groups are fakes (don't come from the original source). Which ones?

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